This critical note examines Romano Màdera’s Una spiritualità laica. La vocazione a essere finalmente umani, reading it simultaneously as a rigorous philosophical work and as a guide for living. The essay traces the tension between contemporary academic philosophy – progressively detached from individual existence – and the “biographical approach” that seeks to restore the singularity of life to philosophical inquiry. Rooted in the Socratic tradition and Pierre Hadot’s concept of philosophy as a “way of life”, the author argues that the primary philosophical question is not “what can I know?” but “how should I live?”. Central to this perspective is the “biographical method”, which redirects philosophical attention from the abstract universalism of modern thought to the “fundamental cell of history”: the individual biography. Drawing on Nietzsche’s imperative to “become what one is”, Jungian psychology, and Ernst Bernhard’s mythobiography, Màdera proposes that the writing of one’s life (bio-graphy) is a transformative philosophical exercise. Through it, the ego shifts from a nominative, sovereign subject to a dative, relational one – constituted by its encounters with otherness.

The article further defines “secular spirituality” as an experiential dimension independent of religious dogma, accessible to believers, agnostics, and atheists alike. By treating individual biographies as differential ethical experiments, Màdera champions a “right to biography” belonging to every person. Finally, with Màdera, we see the possibility of a renewed philosophical practice that integrates personal responsibility – conceived as openness to play and possibility – with a “mystical” attentiveness to the world, in response to the human vocation in an age of planetary crisis.